Visual aids help people understand information. Conveying information to or among groups of people may require creating visual presentations embodying the information. Graphics application programs, such as the Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation application, have helped automate creating such visual presentations. Such graphics application programs allow users to convey information more efficiently and effectively by putting that information in an easily understandable format.
A graphic is a visual idea representation, such as a diagram or other drawing. A graphic is typically composed of several graphical elements (e.g., nodes shown in a drawing canvas) that represent content embodying an idea, such as, for example, a bulleted list (e.g. shown in a text pane). Each graphical element is a part of the displayed graphic. A graphical element can have both textual characteristics and graphical characteristics. Graphical characteristics generally refer to pictorial or other graphical element visual features. Textual characteristics generally refer to the written matter within the graphical element. Depending on the information and the audience, a graphics application program user generally determines a specific graphic that will best teach or convey underlying information.
In some situations, conventional algorithms only allow users to place elements on a single row. Consequently, if the user wants multiple lines of elements, the user would need to create multiple instances of a single row graphic and append them together. Thus, with the conventional strategy, if any new elements are added, all the different instances need to be updated so they balance appropriately.